Message: 3 Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 09:04:03 -0500 From: Michael Atherton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Mpls List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Mpls] Re: You've got Mail!
Patrick Peterson wrote: > You're making a good point. We can't (and shouldn't; that's the parents's > job) mediate the media. But we can make our schools places where we treat > girls and young women with respect. Is this somehow different than treating boys and young men with respect? -=-=-= No. It would be great if both girls and boys were treated equally in schools -- that's what I'm going for. -=-=-= > And if elected, I want to make sure that > Minneapolis doesn't implicitly discriminate against calling on girls in > classes, especially in the sciences and math. How do you propose to do this? -=-=-=-=-=-=- Broadly, we can look at our curriculum to ensure that no gender bias exists in that, and train staff and faculty in our schools to not use gender bias in their relations with students and the community. -=-=-=-=-=-=- > Ensuring that women graduate > MPS with a healthy sexuality means that we need to make sure that girls > value themselves and are assertive in articulating their needs. It also > means that we need a better health curriculum (which I'll get to later)... Just what is "healthy sexuality?" -=-=-=- I'm not going to bore Mpls-Issues to death any longer with obscure intellectual fieldtrips in the social sciences. Read "Drowning Ophelia" by Mary Pipher for an academic perspective or "Ophelia Speaks" by Sara Shandler for the perspective of the girls themselves (With all this "Ophelia" talk I know some of you are thinking of the 'brevity is the soul of wit' comment. I never intend to be witty, but I'm working on being more brief.) -=-=-=- > We need to recognize the historical shortfalls (e.g. > using "men" to speak of "people," and the fact that there is no formal > second-person pronoun), while realizing that we can alter our language to > fit current reality. Research has shown that the surface structure of words has little to do with the way that people interpret them. In other words, calling people "firemen" does not prevent little girls from becoming "fire fighters." There are far more powerful social forces at work. -=-=-=-=-=-= Okay. That doesn't change the fact that we should be respectful of people anyway. My guess is that women firefighters don't appreciate being called men, or that when women first were elected to Congress that all the restrooms for MC's were called "gentlemen's rooms". It's called respect. -=-=-=-=-=-= > (On a side note: I always hate it when people muck up what "politically > correct" means. To me, being politically correct is about respect -- you > use the most formal term when speaking about something until they tell you > otherwise. To me, being politically correct is about trying to artificially enforce respect in violation of individual rights. -=-=-=-=-= Thanks for sharing. Now everybody knows what we both thing of political correctness. And the internet proves indispensable yet again. -=-=-=-=-= > I AM concerned about violence in our schools, and one of the ways I propose > we diffuse some of that conflict is by increasing peer mediation programs in > our schools. Peer mediation is a program where students learn conflict > resolution strategies, and then when conflict erupts among students, those > peer mediators use the strategies to resolve the conflict without violence > or getting administrators involved. Good idea; can you cite research to show that such programs are effective? 1. "Peer Mediation in the Schools: Teaching Conflict Resolution to Students." NASSP Bulletin: v78 n560 2. "A Review of Selected School-Based Conflict Resolution and Peer Mediation Projects." Journal of School Health v65 n10 p426-31 Dec 1995 3. The Impact of Peer Mediation Training on the Management of School and Home Conflicts. American Educational Research Journal v32 n4 p829-44 Win 1995 4. The Benefits of Peer Mediation in the Context of Urban Conflict and Program Status. Urban Education v35 n3 p324-55 Sep 2000 All these journals are accessible at the University of Minnesota libraries and maybe from MPL. As someone with a tc.umn.edu address I assume you know where to look. > What we need is better health education. Health used to be one of the few > classes that students knew they had to take or else they wouldn't graduate, > so nobody (neither the students nor in many cases the teachers) was really > engaged in one of the most important classes students will take. We can > start reforming health education by changing the curriculum, which means we > should talk to students and find out what kind of education they need. In > short, there is a lot that we can do to give young people healthy attitudes > about their self-image, their sexuality, etc... If Sharon Henry-Blythe is > reading, I bet she has some good ideas on teen pregnancy prevention. So how would you feel about offering Human Sexuality course to students? Do you support providing access to brith control in schools? -=-=-=-=- I support human sexuality courses as well as providing access to birth control in schools. -=-=-=-=- > Thank you for your perspective on the gay movement. As a gay man, I have a > different perspective. I don't discuss my romantic life in public, so I > will not comment on what behaviors me or my friends engage in or if youre > anecdote has any relevance to the gay lifestyle today. This seems very Minnesotian to me: you are running as a Gay candidate, but you are unwilling to discuss gay lifestyle issues. I wasn't asking about your personal romantic life, I was citing an example of when "no" doesn't mean "no." -=-=-=-=-= You're right -- I was being Minnesotan (Minnesota Nice, actually). Here is what I mean to say: Gay men engage in a broad range of activities and one cannot characterize the gay lifestyle as being one thing (seducing straight people, circuit parties, excessive drug use, promiscuity, leering, over-sexed men or all the other gay stereotypes out there) or another. Do some gay men seduce people who identify as straight -- probably. Does the Gay High Council meet to decide that all gay people are to engage in that behavior? Come on. Frankly, on this issue, I have trouble seeing your example as a valid one given that (to the best of my knowledge) you are not a gay man nor do you (again, TTBOMK) engage in such behaviors regularly. -=-=-=-=-=- > Oh, Michael, you've made that comment before -- and I've written 3-page long > responses to your questions so I'll save everyone the trouble of making this > e-mail any longer. Without directly answering my questions. Supplemental teacher training does not have much of an impact on achievement, without accountability. What type of accountability do you propose? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Sorry Michael, but Sullivan, Howard J. and Niedermeyer, Fred C. disagree. They wrote Pupil Achievement under Varying Levels of Teacher Accountability. Professional Paper 28. They work for the Department of Education. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > If you'd like, you may send me an e-mail at > [EMAIL PROTECTED], or call me at 612.204.3016 and I'll be happy to > respond to your questions. Why don't you respond to my questions here? I asked you what your educational philosophy was and what you propose to do about the dropout rate? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The dropout rate is actually a function of several factors -- poverty (some kids need to drop out to work and support their family), families that need help (drugs, crime, etc...), teen pregnancy, and getting turned off by school. There is not "one thing" that we are going to do to fix the dropout rate -- it's going to require that we work with parks, libraries, neighborhoods, churches, community centers, and businesses to care about the health of the kids in this city and participate in early intervention so that small problems don't develop into big ones. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Patrick 1-4 _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
